Is Team India underestimating the Aussie challenge Down Under?

Before this summer’s tour of England, a few former international cricketers were quoted as saying that Team India would dominate the series against what they termed as one of the weakest English Test teams. Their logic was that, barring Root and an aging Cook, the English batting lacked class while the bowling would not pose that much of a threat with doubts about the fitness of an aging Anderson and Broad to play five Tests in six weeks.

And we all know what happened with England winning the series by four Tests to one despite Team India coach Ravi Shastri’s bombast that his squad was better than all the previous teams which had toured England and won Test series in 1971, 1986 and 2007. Barring Kohli, the other Indian batsmen succumbed time and again to the pace, seam and swing of Anderson, Broad, Woakes and Stokes, with the opening batsman K L Rahul coming good only in the fifth and final Test when the series had already been decided. Even in the first and fourth Tests when India appeared to be dominating, there was an X-factor in the form of the 20-year-old debutant Sam Curran who batted his team out of trouble and bowled them to victory with his left-arm medium-pace and his nagging line and length..

With just a fortnight left for the tour of Australia, there is a feeling of deja vu with quite a few former international cricketers being quoted as saying that this is Team India’s best chance of thumping a weakened Australia in the four-Test series which begins at Adelaide on December 6.

Australian Jeff Thomson, the fastest and most feared bowler in the world during the 1970s, was quoted as saying during a literary sports festival in India that Virat Kohli’s squad could steamroll Australia if the batting supported the bowlers and if the other Indian batsmen backed Kohli. Thommo noted that the Aussie batting would be severely handicapped by the absence of Steve Smith and David Warner (both suspended for a year from March 2018 for ball-tampering, along with the opener Cameron Bancroft)

While highlighting Thomson’s `steamrolling’ prediction, the Indian media, especially the 24-by-7 TV news-channels, have tended to play down what the Aussie legend said about the need for the other Indian batsmen to support Kohli, something which consistently did not happen on the tour of England. Granted Pujara, K L Rahul and Rishabh Pant scored one century each but there was not much of a contribution in the other 9 innings they played.

The Indian media has also tended to forget the fact that the Aussie bowling will be back at its formidable best with the fast bowlers Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood returning from injury. In his last Test series earlier this year on the tour of South Africa, Cummins was the second highest wicket-taker after Kagiso Rabada. Cummins took 22 wickets in the four Tests while Hazlewood took 12. The Aussie left-arm fast bowler Mitchell Starc took 12 wickets in the three Tests he played. The most successful spinner from both sides was Australia’s Nathan Lyon with 16 wickets. While the Aussia all-rounder Mitchell Marsh had a total tally of four wickets, he averaged almost 47 with the bat on that very challenging tour of South Africa. Another all-rounder to excel was the quiet and undemonstrative Aussie wicket-keeper Tim Paine who averaged 43 with the bat in a series where the leadership was abruptly dumped on him after the dramatic banning of Smith and Warner.

The Aussie bowling squad of Starc, Cummins, Hazlewood and off-spinner Nathan Lyon (the top wicket-taker with 23 victims from four Tests compared to Ashwin’s 12 from three matches on the 2014-15 series in Australia) will ask probing questions of Team India, especially if the wickets Down Under are no longer flattish batting tracks but tweaked to take Kohli’s batting colleagues out of their comfort zone, going by what former Aussie captain Ricky Ponting said after watching India go down on this summer’s tour of England. Ponting is now a consultant with Cricket Australia.

And it is not as if the Aussie batting is going to roll over when it faces the Indian bowling. An attempt has been made to fill the vacuum left by the attacking opener David Warner by bringing into the Test playing eleven the hard-hitting Aaron Finch, who holds the record for the highest scores in T-20 internationals. He could be accompanied by the 22-year-old Matt Renshaw, an opener cast in the more traditional old-school mould and who already has a highest Test score of 184 to his record against the attacking Pakistani bowlers at Sydney in January 2017 when he was not even 21. Also doing duty will be the two Marsh brothers, Shaun and Mitchell, both of whom did reasonably well on the tour of South Africa when the team was demoralized after the banning of Smith and Warner. The left-handed Shaun Marsh is expected to keep providing stability to the middle order, going by his nickname SOS which is a quip for the number of times he has come to the rescue of his side. And then there is always the X-factor of a hitherto young but not-so-well-known Aussie cricketer coming to the party. Remember just six years ago even Steve Smith was regarded as more of an all-rounder who could bowl leg-spin and reinforce the lower middle order..

Meanwhile, there are still questions about the Indian batting, especially the opening and the middle order. Which is why the experienced opener Murli Vijay has been included in the 18-member touring Test squad despite a disastrous performance in England. The fact that India’s ODI star Rohit Sharma is also back in the Test squad after the failures during the Tests in South Africa earlier this year clearly indicates that there is still a considerable degree of uncertainty about the Indian middle order batting.

So any talk of Team India steamrolling Australia could be highly premature, to say the least.